"Quality" property of VideoWriter object doesn't do anything. How to get higher quality mp4 video?

I'm trying to encode an animation as a video, using MATLAB 2017b. The frames of my animation are in struct F, which is produced earlier with getframe inside a loop.

The documentation for VideoWriter says, under the quality property,

Video quality, specified as an integer in the range, [0,100]. Higher quality numbers result in higher video quality and larger file sizes. Lower quality numbers result in lower video quality and smaller file sizes.

Quality is available only for objects associated with the MPEG-4 or Motion JPEG AVI profile. After you call open, you cannot change the Quality value.

Fair enough. This is what I'm trying:

V = VideoWriter(myfilename, 'MPEG-4');
V.FrameRate = 5;
V.Quality = 85;
open(V);
writeVideo(V,F);
close(V);

However, regardless of what value I set V.Quality to, it produces exactly the same (heavily compressed) video with exactly the same filesize. This setting seems to be ignored.

Is this a bug? If not, then what am I doing wrong? Either way, how can I produce a higher-quality compressed video? (ideally using mp4/H.264, not M-JPEG etc, as I want it to be widely playable)

Thanks.

[Nona nona]

I'm also trying to encode an animation video by using this.

Answer 1

[Lucademicus]

A solution would be to write the video as uncompressed avi, and invoke ffmpeg to compress it to mp4.

I've tested this code in R2019b on Windows and on Ubuntu

%% some example from VideoWriter doc
Z = peaks;
surf(Z); 
axis tight manual 
set(gca,'nextplot','replacechildren'); 

%% video file
if isunix % for linux
    pathVideoAVI = '~/someVideo.avi'; % filename, used later to generate mp4
elseif ispc % fow windows
    pathVideoAVI = 'd:\someVideo.avi'; % filename, used later to generate mp4
end
writerObj = VideoWriter(pathVideoAVI,'Uncompressed AVI');
open(writerObj);

%% animate and write AVI
for k = 1:20 
   surf(sin(2*pi*k/20)*Z,Z)
   frame = getframe(gcf);
   writeVideo(writerObj,frame);
end

close(writerObj); % Close the movie file

%% convert AVI to MP4
pathVideoMP4 = regexprep(pathVideoAVI,'\.avi','.mp4'); % generate mp4 filename
if isunix % for linux
    [~,~] = system(sprintf('ffmpeg -i %s -y -an -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -preset slow %s',pathVideoAVI,pathVideoMP4)); % for this to work, you should have installed ffmpeg and have it available on PATH
elseif ispc % for windows
    [~,~] = system(sprintf('ffmpeg.exe -i %s -y -an -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -preset slow %s',pathVideoAVI,pathVideoMP4)); % for this to work, you should have installed ffmpeg and have it available on PATH
end

Of course you could finish this by removing the AVI file.

[Avery Guild-Bingham]

I tried this still get low quality avi then of course low quality MP4

[Avery Guild-Bingham]

It was a resolution issue for me.

The following seemed to fix it.

figure('units','pixels','position',[0 0 1920 1080])

[Simon]

This is a ridiculous solution - in that it's ridiculous that it's necessary! (I don't know if it still is, I haven't tested for a year or more). But thank you for posting it ;-)

[Lucademicus]

You're welcome, Simon.

Answer 2

[Sudeep Das]

I have the same issue, how do I get a 1080p quality video?

[Avery Guild-Bingham]

figure('units','pixels','position',[0 0 1920 1080])

For me it was a resolution issue. I build the figures at higher resolution and it works

[Simon]

As noted about six times so far above, this question is not about resolution. It's about compression level. If you want to know how to get a video at a certain resolution, please ask a different question.

Answer 3

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

It used to be so that movie2avi and VideoWriter didn't bother with the quality setting on Linux-machines - perhaps that's what you're running into. In my opinion the way to produce the movies with the best control on all settings is to write each frame as an image and then use something like mencoder, ffmpeg or some other standalone program to do that. Another problem might be that the frames grabed with getframe were too small - getframe just grabs a pix-map so its quality is sensitive to the physical size of the frame on-screen. Not much help, but maybe something...

HTH

[Simon]

Thanks, but this is a windows machine. And it's not a resolution problem - the video has clear compression artefacts.

[Sagar Shriram Salwe]

The simplest method to solve this i find out:

Just go to figure created by imagesc

Open file >Export setup and change the size from auto to expected size required.

Suppost 1920x1024 points and save this configuration and again rerun the .m file without closing image.

The expected changes required for high resolution will get obtained after doing this.

Hope this will help

[Andrew Davies]

I didn't find altering the video resoluton changes th eamount of compression used. Increasing the resolution did make things look a bit better, but the high level of compression still produces very poor results.

[Simon]

@sagar This is not a resolution issue. It's about the compression level.

Answer 4

[Andrew Davies]

I have the same issue. The default quality is terrible, which makes the MPEG-4 format unusable for me.

[Lucademicus]

see my answer